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CNET Editors' Rating

The GoodThe 2.5-inch SATA 3 (6Gbps)-based Patriot Memory Pyro solid-state drive (SSD) offers decent performance and works in any application in which other SATA hard drives are used.

The BadThe Patriot Memory Pyro randomly dismounts sometimes when the computer comes out of sleep mode. The drive doesn't come with a drive bay converter to make it work with desktops, and its data transfer rates could use some improvement.

The Bottom LineThe Patriot Memory Pyro is a decent SSD among its peers and will improve your computer's performance significantly when used as a replacement hard drive.

6.8 Overall

Design8.0

Features7.0

Performance6.0

Service and support7.0

Review Sections

The Patriot Memory Pyro is somewhat of a downgrade from the Patriot Wildfire in terms of both price and performance. The drive was slightly slower in our testing and is among the more expensive SATA 3 (6Gbps) solid-state drives on the market. That said, it's still about 90 cents per gigabyte cheaper than its brother and will offer significant improvement to your computer's performance when used as a replacement for the boot drive. Note, however, that you might not want to let the computer go into sleep mode when the drive is used. In our testing, the drive would occasionally dismount when waking up from sleep mode, causing a blue-screen error. If you can live with that, the Patriot Memory Pyro still makes a decent investment.

The Pyro looks basically the same as the Wildfire except for the different label on its top. The drive comes in the standard 2.5-inch, 9mm-thick design. This means it will work in most, if not all, instances in which a regular hard drive of the same design would be used, such as inside a laptop computer. The drive supports different RAID configurations in case you want to add multiples of them together to increase performance or to protect data from drive failure.

Unlike the Wildfire, the Pyro doesn't come with a 3.5-inch drive bay converter. This means you'll have a harder time fitting it inside a desktop computer. However, this is not really a big deal, as we find that you can just let an SSD sit around inside the computer as long as you don't move the system around too much, since it has no moving parts.

Like the Wildfire, the Pyro supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard but also works with the popular SATA 2 (3Gbps) standard and even the original SATA controller. To get the most out of it, obviously, it's recommended to use SATA 3.

We tried the Pyro with all popular operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and it worked as intended. Under Windows 7 64-bit, we did find that once in a while the 240GB drive would dismount when the test computer was coming out of the sleep mode, causing a blue-screen error. In this case, we needed to turn the computer off and restart it again. Since this didn't happen consistently and the tested drive used the latest firmware (version 3.2.0), we assumed that this would only happen with certain motherboards. We recommend that you don't use sleep mode with the drive and instead turn the computer off completely. With this drive, your computer should just take a few seconds to boot up anyway. Still, we hope that this will be resolved via a firmware update.

Cost per gigabyte
The Pyro, though cheaper than the Wildfire, isn't one of the most affordable SSDs we've seen. In fact, at $1.79 per gigabyte (the 240GB version) or $1.67 per gigabyte (the 120GB version), it's more expensive than a few others that offer better performance. Note that the pricing used in this review is that of the current market and might change significantly.

Performance
The Patriot Memory Pyro performed decently in our testing and met our expectations considering the performance of the higher-tier and more expensive Wildfire. We tested the drive by copying a large amount of data both while using it as a secondary drive and while using it as the main (boot) drive of the test machine. In the former case, the drive can show its full throughput speed, and the latter represents what you'd see in normal daily usage.

CNET editor Dong Ngo has been involved with technology since 2000, starting with testing gadgets and writing code for CNET Labs' benchmarks. He now manages CNET San Francisco Labs, reviews 3D printers, networking/storage devices, and also writes about other topics from online security to new gadgets and how technology impacts the life of people around the world.
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